Prison life indeed is tough. The normal principle is that you commit the crime; you serve the sentence. However, some do not commit – they serve; others commit yet they go scot free.
The Ghana Prisons Service is the body constitutionally mandated to be responsible for the safe custody of prisoners as well as their welfare, reformation and rehabilitation of prisoners for their successful integration into society.
In Ghana, there are 45 prisons with twelve major male prisons and seven major female prisons. The prisons are classified based on their level of security and on activities undertaken into the central prisons, local prisons, open camp prisons and agricultural settlement camps.
I have never been convicted but I have visited some prisons and heard people share their very harrowing experiences inside those walls which separate you from the outside world. These experiences have always been denied by prison officials.
Correctional facilities as they are known in other countries do not apply here in Ghana. In Ghana, they are hardening facilities with officials who have no respect for human rights and can’t even differentiate between the remanded, the convicted and the condemned. It is an undeniable truth that the Ghana Prisons Service does not uphold the international human right standards. Once you are within those walls, their judgment is that you are a criminal and treated as such.
In the typical prison in Ghana, there is intense overcrowding, you are served very stinky food, you may not be even allowed to bathe for weeks, you must develop sleeping tactics i.e., either you take turns to sleep or you squeeze yourselves together. The very bright lights are always on to damage your eyes and even if you think you have food from the outside the way it is treated, as though the food is not meant for Homo sapiens. These activities are just intended to harshly punish prisoners.
Are our prisons correctional facilities or dens churning out hardened criminals?
The Ghana prison systems fail to adequately reform and rehabilitate inmates, ipso facto; do not qualify as correctional facilities. Of course you may end up being more spiritual because the churches will come around to proclaim God’s word and love to you. This often leads to the phenomenon of recidivism. This failure on behalf of the prisons service to perform its mandate leads to prisoners accepting proposals particularly from those sentenced to life imprisonment so their unfinished businesses in the outside world would be carried out for them. This makes most prisoners end up again in prison after been released.
How effective is our criminal justice system?
In Ghana the criminal justice system is mainly concerned with apprehending the offender and punishing the offender usually by imprisonment. This has seriously accounted for the overcrowding and poor conditions in our prisons. Question is, must every convict be imprisoned? At least, we can find ways of dealing with people convicted by the courts for misdemeanors rather them placing them in prison. We could get them to carry out their sentences by performing duties to the benefit of the communities. Rotting in our prisons are also suspects remanded in prison custody for years without being allowed access into the court rooms for their cases to be heard.
This phenomenon is due to unending police investigations. Some suspects remanded in prison custody are unable to engage the services of lawyers to defend them in court. When luck dawns on these suspects and they are declared not guilty, they are let out to go free without any compensation whatsoever to start life all over .The wasted years can never be regained. These happenings only provide fertile grounds for Ghanaians to lose hope in the criminal justice system.
Do our prison officials really care about the health of the inmates? I visited the Nsawam medium security prisons some time ago and indeed, I wondered whether the prison officials had any sense of hygiene. The way they handled food all in the name of inspecting the food, I am very sure they just contaminate and then finally pass it on to the desperate inmate who is torn between two options; either eating the deadly prison food or the contaminated food from home. These officials are just killing the prisoners softly and slowly.
In view of all these it must be pointed out explicitly that successive governments have done very little to strengthen prison systems in their bid to fight crime. The approach over the years have only made our prisons storehouse for criminals and later releasing them back into society.
Going forward, government must in the midst of all these economic crisis, find funds to revamp the Ghana Prison Service to carry out its duties efficiently particularly its reformation and rehabilitation activities. This is one of the efficient ways of clamping down criminal activities that have eaten deep into them moral fabric of the Ghanaian society.
The government must also deal with the issues of legal services delivery to those inmates who cannot afford legal services. The criminal investigations department of the Ghana police service must also train its personnel to carry out investigation appropriately within reasonable time limits and provide the necessary logistics for them to carry out their work.
The Ghanaian society must refrain from the act of stigmatizing prisoner or ex-convicts and families must aid in the integration of ex-convict back into society. This way, our common and perpetual enemy; crime would be reduced to drastic levels in our society.
